Lachrymae
by Shelomit
Summary: After a couple of decades as a monster, Lord Vader has few illusions left. A gloomy songfic (after a fashion) in five brief strains.
1. I: Flow, my tears—

_Lachrymae._

_I._

_Flow, my tears; fall from your springs.  
Exiled, forever let me mourn  
Where night's black bird her sad infamy sings;  
There let me live, forlorn.  
_…

You were never good at dissembling. Fortunately, you no longer have to.

Few men are quite what they seem, but your sins are limned in flesh, plain and true. Your subordinates, your enemies, your master, and the nightmare-harried children of the galaxy can all apprehend you at a glance. The past faces were never wholly your own. Among those many masks are the trembling coward rumored to know no fear, prophesied savior who proves to destroy—murderer in the guise of lover. Now and at last, you are precisely what you appear to be: monster, demon, and living corpse. An avatar of death, perhaps, who turns to crumbling dust everything he touches?

You are your own disfigurement; the true face and the false one are death's-heads both.

Having been reborn as what you always were, your exile is complete. Few still live who could recognize you as a fabled hero, or even a fallen one—certainly no former friends to intrude upon the communion of sinner with shame. The false self from whose ashes you arose has been eulogized and laid to rest, along with most of those who ever loved him.

Three men remain who know who you once were. One you pursue, though even the thought of vengeance proves a sorry incentive these days. You know you hated him once, but the years have fermented that emotion into a nameless confusion tainted with remembered affection and respect. You maintain an ambition of killing him someday, because he will expect it of you. The second has always laughed in your presence. It took years, poor thing, to realize he laughed at you. Maybe he recognized your inhumanity from the start and thus savored the opportunity to align form with content; maybe, like the monarchs of antiquity, he always fancied his jesters deformed.

The third levels at you a hatred of almost dazzling purity and it is in his presence that disgrace stings coldest. On those infrequent occasions when you forget to be sad, he is always ready to oblige by reminding you of everything you threw away, and how little you got by the bargain. You have never been able to deny the accusations of this last. Though the closest of all your old acquaintances, he offers no comfort, cloaking himself within a blackness that marks despair as well as darkness, night so deep that it swallows all hope of dawn.

It is at these times that you frighten yourself the most.

...


	2. II: Down, vain lights—

_Lachrymae._

_II._

_Down, vain lights! shine you no more.  
No nights are dark enough for those  
That in despair their last fortunes deplore;  
Light doth but shame disclose._

…

You were still a young man when you first donned the mask. It was the easy pride of youth that allowed you to deflect blame, hiding as you did behind an armor of sullenness bound to willing blindness. At first you railed and struck out against any who tried, however cruelly, to help you. Accusations fell from your mouth in a voice unrecognized and unconvincing, helpless to convey the petulance with which the words should have been laced. Not for you a single scapegoat: the Order made you inhuman, while the Wars made you inhumane. You fixed both the old master and the new one with an accusing eye. Once you even managed to blame her—though that did not last long, the thought soon banished as blasphemy.

Such reassuring falsehoods filled a useful function. Your teacher was willing enough to weave another unreality for your consumption. Long practice had already made you adept at tracing the interconnections of accountability that he constructed to satisfy your hungry gaze. They kept you sane and striving; revenge gave you reason to stay alive. In those first precarious weeks, such a pragmatic deception was not to be discounted. It is always easier when one knows whom to hate.

Only with the march of bitter years have you allowed yourself the complication of truth. If age has not exactly lent you humility, you have at least learned your limitations. In a sea of new sensations, self-honesty proved newest. Tinted vision or cotton-muffled hearing may disorient, but they are only the shadows of aestheses that you still can—if with increasing difficulty—remember. You did not relearn this, did not discover it as a familiar object peripherally seen. You had never trod this path before. The task proved painful, and you had no guide in its pursuit.

Memory itself distorts, but here it could not interfere. This new honesty was no simulacrum of an old, but instead the removal of the veil, the lighting of the scrim. By now you have grown out of self-pity.

Your pride survived its immolation. You would never admit culpability, even to the one confidante who has not yet abandoned you. Alone, however, you can afford to be honest, or can no longer afford to lie. This is what you have come to know: while you may not have wholly understood what you were doing, you did it nonetheless. You were used by no one, subject to no one. You had no corrupter whom you did not willingly follow. When your world fell down around you, it was because you had crushed its foundations, had made a devastation of everything you once were. All that has soured in your life was curdled by your own corrupting touch. You masterminded this hecatomb of possibilities, irreparably trapping yourself within terrors of your own creation. This is what you have chosen, o Chosen.

Once again, you know whom to hate.

...

(The _Star Wars_ franchise, as I am only too painfully aware, is not mine. Criticism is welcomed. The next section will be ready for posting in roughly a week.)


End file.
